


The New Children of Thanos

by scioscribe



Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies), Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Reality Bending, Rebellion, Time Shenanigans, Time Travel, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 13:01:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15316047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: After his victory, Thanos goes back in time to collect his fiercest and most dangerous opponents.  They'll be his children.  They'll be his trophies.It's a bad idea to gather your enemies together, no matter how all-powerful you think you are.





	The New Children of Thanos

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to S. for the advanced read.

******STEVE**

“That’s quite a heart you have,” Thanos says when Steve picks himself up off the ground yet again.

Steve blinks blood out of his eyes.  “Actually,” he says, “it’s a little weak.”

Thanos smiles.  “I can take care of that for you.”

He expands Steve’s chest: there’s a cage of titanium underneath his skin.  His new heart rattles the bars. His new lungs are slick and plasticky, vacuum bags that push the air in and out too quickly: the hyperventilation tricks his body into shooting out extra adrenaline.  Muscles grow on him while petri-dish gel cools on his arms; he’s like meat grown in a tube. His skin hurts all the time. If he could get home now, even Bucky wouldn’t recognize him. He looks like Frankenstein’s monster, all black stitches and bolts and brute strength.

When Steve’s body is done, Thanos says, “You’re welcome,” and gives Steve a knife.  “You can take your own life with that or you can take it up for me and go out among the worlds and spread the gospel of death.”

“You need to work on your sales pitch,” Steve says.  “I think there’s a third choice.”

He didn’t grow up in Brooklyn to not know how to handle a knife.  He comes in low. Go below the sternum, push up into the heart.

But Thanos holds him back with just one hand.  Laughs at him. He says, “Did you really think I’d give you a body you could use to kill me?”

 

**TONY**

He is seventeen, on a green lawn at MIT; spoiled not through over-indulgence but inattention, like milk left in the fridge too long.  His nose is still burning with coke. His brain is rocketing around like it’s a pinball machine.

Obadiah says, _The deal of a lifetime, Tony_ and _someone who understands tough solutions_ and _a future your father never even dreamed of._ Obadiah puts an arm around his shoulders.  A mosquito bites his neck.

Tony wakes up on a spaceship.  Sold for his birthright.

“Ordinarily I just take what I want,” Thanos says, his big square hand against Tony’s jaw.  “But I need to keep the timeline as intact as possible, and it’s hard to make a prince disappear without changing the world.”

“Wake up and smell the fireworks,” Tony says.  “I’m not a prince. America doesn’t have princes.”

“You are heir to your father’s kingdom.  Held on a leash by the man who dealt you over to me.  You were a prince, he sold you as a slave, and now you are a son of Thanos, as you were always meant to be.”

Thanos looks like a wad of used bubblegum; thinks like a drunken toddler.  His logic is like a drill boring holes in Tony’s brain: _get out of here with this shit_ , he thinks.   _Who do you think you’re kidding?_

But it is a short line between selling death and becoming it.  Time makes a weapon of him.

Thanos gives him plans for armor.  Says, “Build.”

 

**NATASHA**

She tries not to have an opinion about it.  She’s used to being the dog at someone else’s command, human only when there’s no one else around.  There is nothing she does for Thanos that she hasn’t already done.

Then there’s the thrill.  In space, the old game has new rules and is taught in constant crash courses: she has a data reader clip installed behind her right ear and downloads cultures directly into her brain.  She learns which worlds won’t trust her crocodile tears and which worlds won’t expect her to carry a gun. But the thrill is its own problem. It forces her to be more aware. This business rewards intelligence but punishes thought.

Thanos has her dye her hair.  He hates the red. When she waits a day too long to touch up the color, he has a machine tear it out of her by the roots.  After that, she doesn’t forget again.

Alone among his children, she is allowed to not call him Father.

“How about Dad?” Tony says.  “How about Pops?”

“I wouldn’t try it,” Natasha says.

What would she try?  There is an ache in her legs sometimes, her muscles tensed for a jump she hasn’t yet made.  If she runs, she thinks, he won’t follow. It doesn’t matter why he stole her, he doesn’t want her.  He’ll let her go. If she’s willing to leave them. She doesn’t know when she started believing in brothers and sisters.  It’s going to fuck her up.

 

**T’CHALLA AND SHURI**

Thanos takes them early—they are among the first trophies in his collection—but late, late in their time-stream, late in their lives, only minutes before they would battle against him.

Shuri screams.  She spits in Thanos’s face.  “They’ll think we’re running away!  Kill us if you have to, but leave our bodies there so they’ll know we died with Wakanda!”

“What a brave girl,” Thanos says, instead of doing as she asked.  “And such a clever mind. I think you almost could have done what you were trying, if you’d had enough time.”  He smiles. Time is a joke to him now.

When T’Challa became king, his father said to him, “So once again I see you here.”  T’Challa didn’t understand then, but on Thanos’s ship, he begins to. He doesn’t recognize his new brothers and sisters until their numbers start to swell: then the ones he knows do not always know him.

“Digs his hand into time over and over again like it’s a Jell-O salad and he’s pulling out cranberries,” Steve Rogers says.  “Sooner or later the whole thing will tumble.”

“That’s disgusting,” Shuri says, but she’s revolted by the simile, not by the meddling with the laws of the universe.  T’Challa knows his sister. He watches her as she moves around the ship like a hummingbird, drinking up knowledge like sugar water.  She collaborates with the Stark boy. The Romanoff woman whispers to her, teaches her how spiders hide in the dark toes of stowed-away shoes, teachers her how and when to bite.

She says to him, “When the time comes, brother, I’ll know what to do to break his hold on that damned glove he wears.”

“We must not have known before,” T’Challa says.  “Else we would be victors and not trophies.”

Shuri’s smile has grown shaky in their imprisonment.  When she is asleep, she sometimes still cries for their mother.  “Now you’re bringing me down, T’Challa.”

“No,” he says, and kisses her forehead.  “I expect one day you’ll have a constellation in your honor and I’ll grow accustomed to looking _up_ to you.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Shuri says.  The serene disaffection of the young.

Thanos starts to call Shuri his little jewel.  Whenever he does, she shudders. Or rages.

Thanos’s words are for T’Challa’s ears, too.  A jewel is something to be cut and refashioned.  Thanos likes Shuri’s sharp eyes, but her eyes could be made sharper.  Extra processing power could be built into her skull. T’Challa has seen what Thanos does with those who attract his curiosity but lose his respect.  With those who could be better, yet cannot be trusted to improve upon themselves.

So T’Challa fights for Thanos, to move that scalpel away from his sister’s skin.  When he returns, Shuri cleans the blood from his brow and his hands.

“This is not you,” she says.  “This is not your choice. We’ll undo it all.  Believe me.”

He almost does.  But he already knows the dead remember.  His father sees him kill.

 

**STRANGE**

“In a way, you’re the centerpiece of my collection,” Thanos says.  “Without you, none of the rest of this would be possible. I had to try three times to find where to pluck this particular flowering of you, but it was worth it.  All that hubris burned away. All those powers unlocked.”

“All that impatience with dramatic speeches,” Strange says.  “Look, you may have plucked the rest of your _flowers_ as kids or brainwashed assassins, but I’m too old to play this particular game.  I have a life.”

“You _had_ a life.  Once. You had an Infinity Stone.  Once.”

Strange frowns.  “What’s an Infinity Stone?”

“Your curiosity,” Thanos says, chuckling, “will make you mine in the end.  You should know that. Time always wins. I’ll check on you in a hundred years.”

He closes Strange into a pocket of nothingness.  The lack of reality is like gray velvet. It laps against his twitching hands, caresses his eyelids, leaves dust behind.  Mordo whispers in his head, tells him to be calm. _There are rules here as there are everywhere.  Order is the natural state of the universe. You must make your mind adjust._

 _Yeah,_ Strange thinks, _but a hundred years of adjustment sounds incredibly boring._

_How does losing sound?_

_I can lose_ , he thinks, _over and over again_ , and it’s like remembering something from a dream.  In the absence of all life and all matter, it’s as if the air is rarefied.  Things come through that would otherwise be shut out.

 

**WANDA**

He only takes her, not Pietro.  First she fights, then she screams, and finally she begs, but it changes nothing.

She has never left her brother behind.

“We will fight for you,” she says.  Her voice sounds like her tears have burned away her throat.  She is a scorched husk, exhausted by her grief, cannibalized by it.  “We will kill for you. But give him back to me. Please give him back.”

“He was weak,” Thanos says.  “He did not make it to the final battle to stand beside you.  But you—you would rather crack your lover’s life inside of him than surrender.  You are the worthy one, daughter.”

She has been on the ground, but now she looks up.  She will never give him anything but her teeth and her defiance.  “I am not your fucking daughter.”

In the end, he is not the one she kills for.  She kills for the ghost-girl, the spirit as blue as the heart of a flame, the only soul on the ship as angry as Wanda herself.  The ghost-girl is made of frayed wires and unoiled hinges. Her voice is a froggy croak. She says Thanos spent her sister’s life like coin.  There is nothing the ghost-girl wants but her sister back; nothing Wanda wants but her brother. She kills to live—not because she likes living, but because she is the only one who sees and hears the ghost.  Wanda does not want to leave her lonely, a key without a lock.

 

**BRUCE**

Thanos tells Bruce he’s here because Bruce stood on the fields of Wakanda.  “And I have seen your beast before. True power circles you but never touches down, at least not in my presence.  All that unrealized potential—you should show me some again, if you want to live.”

“You have been to Wakanda?” T’Challa says.

“I have no clue what the hell he’s talking about,” Bruce says.  “I’ve never been within a thousand miles of Wakanda.”

“What about the potential?” Natasha says, and when he says he doesn’t know what Thanos means there, either, she nods with that placid expression of hers.  She knows he’s lying.

Bruce is a rubber band stretched to the breaking point and he knows what’s going to happen when the snap comes: hello, Hulk, forever, because once Thanos gets hold of the other guy, he’ll keep him.  The Hulk won’t be able to kill him. The Hulk will belong to him, like an attack dog on a chain, a dog starved and cuffed until it’s maddened. He has to hold back. Hold in. He’s on a spaceship in an unknown galaxy and his only companions are hostages and cultists, all armed, all dangerous.  There’s a girl whose skin blooms with magic like red roses. There’s a man so swollen and monstrous he’s like a warning put up in Bruce’s view: see this? Don’t. Don’t give Thanos that. Don’t give him one more weapon.

As Bruce, he kills, but he does it badly.  Thanos watches him.

 

**THOR AND LOKI**

When Thanos comes, he comes only for Thor.  He is weary of Loki and says so. _The snivelling failure,_ Thanos calls him, _who sold the universe to stop his brother’s screams.  I wouldn’t take you even to hear yours like sweet music for the rest of eternity._

But Loki is a snake wrapped around Thor’s wrist, a louse in his hair, a hound at his heels, an ant on his boot.  Whenever Thanos rids himself of the pest, the pest is back again.

“Go, brother,” Thor says.  They have been in this push-pull for days.  Thor’s eyes are bruised with exhaustion. “Asgard will need a king.”  He smiles; his lower lip cracks open. “You can build a statue of me.”

“Thank you, but no,” Loki says.  Sweat rolls down his face. “Of the two of us, I’m clearly the only one deserving of monuments.”

And on and on, until it becomes clear that Thanos can’t take Thor without taking Loki too.  The sorest of losers, he will not be satisfied until he turns this to his advantage. He makes sure that Thor and Loki spend much of their time under his sheltering wing in agony.  They have remarkable regenerative powers; it’s a challenge to figure out what damage they won’t naturally overcome in time.

Thanos learns that their healing bodies don’t know what to do with the inorganic matter he leaves in them.  He tears out Loki’s throat and carefully rebuilds it with steel rods. Loki’s vocal cords, gradually reconstructing themselves, twine up around their supports like ivy and then dead-end.  Even his cries of pain are silent. He sends projections all over the ship to howl and shriek; he stops only when Thanos asks him if he would like his brother to share his fate.

In Thor’s eyes, the color of ice, there is a promise of destruction so absolute as to make Ragnarok seem like a toddler smashing a toy.

Thanos tires of them after that.  He’s wrung enough self-assurance out of their fall.

Natasha teaches Loki and Thor sign language.  Sometimes she stops the lessons for days at a time; when she resumes them, she always remembers exactly where they left off.  They learn quickly.

All of Thanos’s children learn a few words.  They have a grubby loyalty to even the newest among them.  And a language that their father does not know will always be useful.

But in gesture or in speech, there is something Thor never says.

Thanos’s constant interference has made the universe porous.  With each new child of Thanos pulled out of time, the story of the universe makes less and less sense, and the holes grow more and more noticable.  Lives no longer stretch as they once did, no longer cover the gaps.

 _Everything,_ Loki says with his hands, _is happening somewhere_ , and Wanda-the-witch nods, her gaze fervent.

And out across the vastness of space, some version of Mjolnir knows that Thor reaches for it.  It loyally stirs; moves toward his hand.

 

**SAM**

Thanos says Sam should be able to fly.  Sam agrees in theory but he knows Thanos well enough by now to know there’s no way in hell they’re talking about the same thing.  They’re not.

The metal wings Thanos installs take root in his shoulder blades and distort his spine until Thanos grows impatient and replaces that too.   _Little bird,_ Thanos calls him.  Sam looks out the blood-red eyes Thanos gave him and thinks, _You made a big mistake when you made me stronger.  An even bigger one when you packed so many people who hate you into such a small space._

If what Thanos tells them is true, they almost beat the hell out of this guy once, and that was before he hijacked their bodies with all these mods and gave them a galaxy to learn from.  Thanos has power, sure. Murderous assholes throughout history have had power; history’s still full of their Icarus falls. Sam believes and doesn’t let himself think that he believes because he needs to.

He talks to Steve, who has the same mad faith.  He talks to the Tony kid, who tells Sam he doesn’t believe in better but he does believe in bombs, sabotage, and freedom; he smiles a mad smile.  Madness is what they all have in common. Madness and a history they can’t reach.

“Kings don’t usually smile on revolutions,” T’Challa says.  “But yours I like.”

Sam’s always been good at taking the world apart and putting it back together.

 

**PETER PARKER**

Peter tries to talk to him.  Okay, so he’s never met an alien before and he didn’t expect to have first contact in his kitchen, a dinner knife slipping around in one sweaty palm, but he can do this.  He can see from the start that there’s something wrong with Thanos. A smell like unwashed body and burnt metal, blown-out fuses and rotten meat. Nothing Thanos says makes any sense.

“If you grabbed a knife, then I came too early,” Thanos says.  He sounds disappointed, creepy-disappointed, like Peter brought home a bad grade on a test when Thanos expected more from him.  “It doesn’t matter. I will make you who you would have become.”

“I don’t want to become anything,” Peter says.  His voice is cracking. He wants May. But even more than that, he wants her to come home late, wants her to be far, far away from this huge Grapealicious guy with his weird smells and his screwed-up digressions.  “Something must have happened to you, you’re confused. Something’s wrong, just… let me get somebody to help you.” Who? SHIELD? Captain America?

“There is no help for me.”  Thanos smiles the world’s weariest smile.  He looks around this little Queens apartment like he’s seeing the whole cosmos.  “This was to be the place of rescue. Everything—everything falls apart. Now come.”

Peter is fourteen.  Thanos says it’s a good age: his body is still malleable.

After each surgery, the others wipe the blood off him and give him stolen painkillers.

 

**OKOYE**

Of all Thanos’s children, only Okoye comes of her own free will; only Okoye seeks him out, as much as you can seek out a man unencumbered by time, unbound by the whims of reality.  She makes do. And at last, like the fighting general she is, she simply _does_ , and comes face to face with him.

She says to Thanos, “You took my king and my princess.  I have every right to destroy you and paint my eyelids with your blood to carry the sight of your death into my dreams.”

He says, “The king and princess of Wakanda yet live.”

“Then give them back to me.”

“Part with my own children?”

Okoye spits.  “They are the children of T’Chaka and Ramonda.  They are the children of Wakanda. They must come home.”

“No,” Thanos says, “home has come to them,” and he picks her up by the throat.

She does not struggle.  She meets his eyes. He is the murderer of half the universe, but why should she fear him?  She sees through this coward.

“I was going to come for you, daughter, slayer of my daughter,” he says, “but now here you are.”

He takes her, as she intended him to.

She and T’Challa and Shuri sleep with their garments in a tangle.  They do not stop their crying for days.

“Now,” Okoye says, when the time comes that she is willing to look beyond her people, “where is this revolution?  When are we going to kill him?”

 

**MANTIS**

Her new life is like her old- _old_ life.  She is not hurt, though every day she walks through charnel houses.  She eases a bad, powerful man into sleep. Mantis feels the weight of his sorrow but he does not feel the weight of hers, because Thanos doesn’t really believe in other people.  So he doesn’t care about her loneliness, that she has so many new brothers and sisters but none of her old friends.

Except Nebula.  From time to time, she sees Nebula and waves at her.  Nebula is dead, of course, but most of these people were dead at one time or another: Mantis can feel it on them, sticky shrouds of old timelines.  Nebula’s witch friend, the king of cats, the flying man who is sort of their captain, the brother who speaks with his hands, the spider boy with his many retractable legs.  Nebula is _dead-_ dead, dead _now_ , but now isn’t always.

Mantis shares the pain of her brothers and sisters.  She makes her rounds each evening and helps them dream pleasant dreams.  The assassin lady who reminds her of Gamora sometimes turns her down. So does the non-spider boy, the one they say used to be Thanos’s favorite, the one who made their armor.  He says sometimes he deserves the nightmares. Mantis says no. He says yes. He can always say yes more times than Mantis can say no, and that makes her sad.

Everything on the _Sanctuary_ makes her sad.  She misses the _Milano_.

 

**BUCKY**

There is no reason for him to recognize Steve right away, but he recognizes Steve right away.  Steve’s been hacked at more than a butcher’s counter and he’s got a body straight out of a back-alley freak-show, but he’s Steve, all right, and Bucky knows him.

He’ll take the rest of it as it comes.

The most bizarre thing about being scooped up by Thanos is that apparently space is like a small town where you keep running into all the same people.  Steve. This smart-ass kid who says he’s Howard Stark’s son, which Bucky guesses is possible because lately everything is. Banner—SHIELD used to be obsessed with Banner’s disappearance, not that Bucky’s going to get anything out of bringing them the answer now.  And Thor and Loki _,_ now attached at the hip.  Loki is on their side now, apparently.  Bucky doesn’t know the spider-kid, but the spider-kid knows him.  Asks for his autograph, says, “Thanks, Captain America, wow,” like Bucky’s signature means anything way out here.

“You’re taking this in stride,” Steve says.

“I have a lot to catch you up on,” Bucky says.  “Reality on Earth has been a little iffy these last few decades.”  He fills Steve in, but the popsicle years mean he has to leave a lot to the imagination.

Bucky hits it off with Sam, the pararescue guy with wings, who doesn’t ask for his autograph—thank God—but clearly knows him already.

“Too bad you didn’t bring the shield,” Sam says.  “We could’ve used that.”

 

**RHODEY**

“Looks like it’s the old friends battalion lately,” Romanoff says.

Rhodey agrees but gives her nothing else: “Looks like.”

The last time Rhodey knew Tony, the two of them were sneaking booze together, flagrantly risking Rhodey getting kicked out of ROTC, and Tony was dabbling in more serious things, like coke and speed and the inner workings of the fucking universe.  He’s thirty-six now, Tony’s not even nineteen.

Romanoff gets tired of waiting for him.  “Talk to Sam,” she says. “He’s going to need you.  Military likes military. And Thor has something in his back pocket, I’m pretty sure.  Wanda and Loki too, maybe Shuri. Oh, and there’s a wizard somewhere here, if we can find him.”

“Why trust me?” Rhodey says, because maybe her answer will be his answer, and, as it turns out, it is.

“Thanos collects trophies,” Natasha says.  “We almost stopped him and now he lines us up like dolls.  We wouldn’t all be here if we weren’t all people who could stand up to him, one way or another.”

Oh, he likes the sound of that.  He’ll stand up to Thanos any day of the week, or so he thinks until Thanos puts a weapon in his hand and says kill ten people or Thanos will kill twenty two hundred.  Thanos doesn’t screw around when it comes to the numbers game. Rhodey makes tally marks on the inside of the suit Tony builds for him, counts up the dead he’ll have to apologize to someday.

 

**HEIMDALL**

The princes were mere boys the last time Heimdall saw them.  The night Thanos split apart the Observatory of Asgard and ripped Heimdall out of it like a crab from its shell, Thor and Loki, young and soft-faced, were sprawled on their stomachs on the Rainbow Bridge, dangling their heads off the side to look down.  Heimdall tells them not to do this, but they do it anyway. Unfailingly. Now here they are, grown and battered, Loki’s throat mutilated, Thor’s eyes ancient.

They are all of them outside of time now.  The stories told on the _Sanctuary_ seldom match up: Thanos has rewritten history so many times he has destroyed the book.  Thanos is unstoppable, maybe, but sooner or later, the universe itself will stop him, will pull down its ceiling and crush its false emperor and the rest of them with him.  Maybe he’s an idealist, but he hopes for a different victory.

He can see through the gauze of Thanos’s reality: he finds the magician and frees him and Thanos is untethered enough by now that he doesn’t even notice.  Strange confers with them all.

Heimdall knows his part in all this—he sees the ghosts and hears their messages.  He sees Mjolnir, closer and closer to Thor’s hand. He can wait, yes. For the death of the one who ravaged existence—who stole half the light from his princes’ eyes and him from his life entirely—Heimdall can wait.   _Provided we hurry_ , he thinks as the universe quakes around them.

 

**DRAX**

Drax may be a newcomer but he’s the only one who lived through one of Thanos’s old purges.  He knows Thanos’s methods. Half. Always half. The kind of man who, given a cantaloupe and six children, slices the melon in two and kills four of the children.

“Only in this case,” Drax says, “three of the children.  Because it’s half.”

“An analogy destined for _Bartlett’s_ ,” the magician says.

The bug-lady is sad that he doesn’t remember her and has been cuddling his arm since his arrival.  They have mutual friends, none of them here, so Drax lets her, but he finds it mildly disgusting. Still, she’s harmless.  And not stupid, because now she says, in her piping little voice, “You’re listening to what he says but it’s why he’s saying it that matters.”

The magician raises his eyebrows.  “Oh? And why is that, Drax?”

“Thanos kills half the population of the universe.  We know he does, because the panther-king’s soldier was there.  But now he has us kill more. Why?”

“He’s insane,” the spy says.  “We know that.”

“Not insane,” Thanos says.  His arrival should make them scatter apart like cockroaches, but they constrict, moving closer together.  “Only embattled. Embittered. I have seen the aftermath of my victory, my children, and they spoil it. You are the only ones who deserve the universe.  And by your labor, you alone will lay claim to it.”

“You hate,” Mantis says to Drax.  “You burn with it.”

He’s looking at Thanos.  “I know.”

 

**ROCKET AND GROOT**

Rocket throws everything he has at Thanos, and Rocket has a _lot_.  None of it makes any difference.  Thanos shish-kabobs him, laughs at him, and has his pet techie fix a literal rocket launcher onto Rocket’s arm.  A small one, light. Maneuverable. It’s not the worst thing that’s been done to Rocket’s body in the name of better living through science and hey, at least the techie apologizes, which is new, and at least he tries to pet Rocket and Rocket gets to bite the shit out of his hand, which isn’t new but _never_ gets old.  If he thinks like this, all rat-a-tat-tat, everything stays manageable, everything stays funny.  He’s got Groot to look after, right? The tree has no sense. He’s already making friends, like you can just make friends with people.

Apparently Thanos’s cool new thing is wanting them to kill everybody in the fricking universe except for each other.  Rocket kind of sympathizes with that when he has a hangover, but right now, not so much. Though they do have a killer still here; they mix up a wicked brew of pruno that’s disgusting but kicks like a steel-toed boot.

Two of these people seem to think Rocket and Groot should know them and be all lovey-dovey with them.  They don’t understand that he just doesn’t get like that with people… except then he does, for some reason.  He’s going soft. One day it’s him, then it’s him and Groot, and now it’s him and Groot and all these people, the techie and the slinks-around spy and the bird-dude and the murdery Asgardian and the actual fricking royalty (might turn into cats, Rocket’s not sure) and the bulked-up blond and the spider and yeah, everybody.  Yippee-ki-yay, they’re a family.

Everybody learns a little bit of Groot.  The really good-looking Asgardian guy knew it already, which is a trip.  Go figure.

So when they make their plan, they make it in Groot and Xhosa and sign language and weird witch-aided telepathy.  Thanos is cut out entirely.

The plan’s a jumbled thing, even to Rocket’s less-than-refined sensibilities.  There’s Thor’s hammer, which apparently isn’t his dick, which is what Rocket first thought they were talking about.  There’s a ghost roaming around. There’s some chick who’s not a ghost but also not, Strange says, “real in a technical sense,” somebody he met in Thanos’s little pocket o’ nothing.  There’s iron armor and magic. There’s Mantis’s creepy empathy hands and the weird way Thanos looks at Natasha, which nobody likes.

Sam says Thanos pooled together the best fighters in the galaxy and really, really pissed them off.  Sweet hubris, sweeter destruction.

Steve says that Thanos is right.  They’ll inherit the universe, what’s left of it, and then they have to make sure they take care of it.  Less of a pep talk, more of a downer.

“The Guardians of the Galaxy,” Drax says suddenly.  Mantis claps her hands.

Rocket ought to be embarrassed to be seen with these people.  He’s not.

 

**PETER QUILL**

Thanos tells Peter he is the final piece.  Thanos tells him this while yanking Peter away from Yondu, who won’t let go; Peter has a bruise on his arm the shape of Yondu’s hand for weeks afterward.  He’s fifteen and this is the second time he’s been abducted by aliens. This time he knows how to deal with it; this time he only cries when nobody else is around.

“He took you very young,” Mantis says.  “I don’t think he wanted to remember you with Gamora.”

“He could have not taken me at all if he felt that broken up about it,” Peter says.  “And who’s Gamora?”

Thanos’s kid, apparently—well, who the hell isn’t?  This place is like some kind of fucked-up daycare for adults, one where instead of getting put in time-out you get your arm cut off—except it’s worse than that, because most of the time the Robocop people turn out to be Thanos’s _favorites_.  If Gamora’s not around, then good for her, she got off easy.

Then she _is_ around.

Strange brings her into Natasha—”Don’t call it a possession,” he says, and Natasha says, “No, _seriously_ , don’t call it a possession”—and right before their eyes, Natasha’s hair grows out, turns a deep red.

“That’s actually me,” Strange says quietly.  “Maybe overselling it, but I think it’s a nice touch.  Gamora, are you with us?”

She is.  She looks at him and says, “Peter?”  Her voice sounds like a ballad, older than any song Peter knows.

 

**(NEBULA)**

Nebula is a ghost now, and Thanos is the house she haunts.  With half the universe in ashes around her, she tracked, a dog with only one scent in her nose; hunted him and found him.  He said, “You can’t kill me, Nebula.” He looked at her with those stone eyes of his, stone eyes eroded into softness, like this was going to be the moment when they fell on each other’s necks and wept for Gamora.

Instead, Nebula said, “I know,” and drew her blade and cut her own throat.  She felt it open without any resistance. He’d left her vulnerable there because his interest was never keeping her safe; he never gave a shit about her.  Her blood gushed out, a fountain. She lived just long enough to see the dark red spray across Thanos’s face. He looked surprised. It was maybe the only time, in her whole life, that he noticed her.

Even now, he doesn’t see her, but she sees him.  She has no trouble sticking to his side as he goes forward and backward in time and shoots across the universe, collecting his fucked-up little trophies one by one.  He mistakes their natures just as he once mistook hers; confuses acquiescence for agreement, fear for loyalty, defeat for surrender. He thinks that having all the powers of the universe will make him invulnerable, immortal.  But Nebula, dead, knows better: one day even the universe is going to die. One day not too far away, really, if Thanos keeps eating holes in it. An unnatural maggot, eating away at the healthy and leaving rot in his wake.

Nebula tells this to Wanda, the witch-girl—for a long time, Wanda is the only one who listens to her.  Wanda might love her, even, Nebula realizes, because Wanda has the ragged edges of someone who feels like half a person, someone who needs a way to not be lonely.  Later Nebula can talk to Loki and Mantis, a little, but she stays closest with Wanda, her new sister, her sideways-self.

Late at night, they whisper to each other, in a susurration of thoughts Thanos will never hear.

_I’m the one haunting him but it’s her he fears.  That’s why he ripped out Natasha’s hair._

_What about Natasha’s hair?_ Wanda says.  In the dark, her own hair is black, like an oil slick around her white, staring face.  There’s an intensity to her Nebula likes.

_It grows in red.  She dyes it. She forgot to dye it and he tore it out of her.  She’s already an assassin, a spy, she already reminds him of Gamora.  You can use that._

_Why does he fear her?_

_Because he loved her,_ Nebula says.  She has no trouble believing this is true.  Her own love has been poison almost as much as it’s been a cure.   _He loved her and he killed her, it’s a kin-death curse on him._

 _That’s old-fashioned,_ Wanda says dryly, _for a conversation we’re having on a spaceship._

 _It’s true.  He didn’t spend her soul for the Soul Stone, he spent his own.  He knows it. It’s driving him mad._ She smiles, like her father’s sickness is something she can taste, a salt to the meat of the murder she’ll do.  She says again, _You can use that._

Wanda says, _What happens to you if we do?_

_What does it matter?_

Wanda’s gaze is steady.   _Because I can’t lose you too.  You are the only reason I’m still alive at all._

If she were still alive, her heart would warm at this, she knows, but she has no warmth anymore.  She lived past her death so that she could kill him. She can’t change purpose now—she has never been able to change her purpose at all.  Nebula has a very straightforward mind. Love her sister. Kill her father.

If she were still alive, she would stay here, with these people.  They would have her as one of them.

But she gave that up and now she can’t even feel the absence of it the way she should.  But she pretends, because for all her rage, she is not cruel: she presses her forehead against Wanda’s, knowing that Wanda can sense it.  She says, _It’s let him live and save me or kill him and save the rest of the universe_.  She’s always been only lukewarm on the rest of the universe, but these people are heroes.  Like Gamora. They’ll do what needs to be done. And so will she. A weapon finally dropped to the ground.

Wanda’s eyes shine tear-bright when she watches Strange pull whatever there is of Gamora into Natasha’s body.  She looks at Nebula. Nebula nods at her: _This is all right.  This is what I want._ And she feels something… compassion, maybe.  It doesn’t feel weak. It makes her feel almost alive.

Wanda guides Nebula into the body that they have prepared for _her_.  As always, it is less real than the one prepared for Gamora: this one not flesh and bone and competing soul but one of Stark’s iron suits, equal parts shield and weapon, like her.  But she no longer minds.

And then she sees her sister again.

 

**(GAMORA)**

Only Gamora knows this:

Thanos searched for her.  Before he traveled through space and time collecting his old opponents, he traveled through them looking for her.  But he could not ever have her, could not ever manipulate the planes to let him through, because the Soul Stone knows nothing of mercy.  He paid. Let the buyer beware. Gamora will always be unreachable to him now.

Whenever he comes back to his present—and he always must, for he must rest somewhere—she is always gone.  She is always dead at his hand.

Her soul does not follow him.  Her soul is elsewhere.

It took the magician, in the nothing, in the nowhere, to brush up against her, to make her recall life.  She died for a stone and so she was stone, smooth and featureless, an object. But her father has always been good at supplying her with allies he did not intend.  She breathes in Strange’s energy. She tells him what she knows. The way the universe unravels a little more each day it is in Thanos’s keeping. The near-impossibility of defeating him.

When he comes to her again and asks her if it’s true Thanos is now planning on wiping the slate clean altogether, all except for the _Sanctuary_ spinning out through space, she answers yes.  She knows it because she knows things, but she also knows it because she knows _him_ , and this is where he was always headed.

Here is what they have, Strange tells her:

They have a ghost— _Nebula_ , but why can’t Gamora feel her?  Why can’t she speak to her? Why even in death is there this fucking wall between them?—in a suit of armor.  Very Haunted Mansion, he says.

They have Gamora herself, working soul-in-body and hand-in-fist with Natasha, for they have pinned much of their hope on the idea that two assassins, two spies, two warriors will become one very easily.  This plan reeks of her own friends having had something to do with it. It has that seat-of-the-pants feel. Strange admits that this wasn’t the part that came from the military side of things. Military and magic, he says, don’t mix.  Magic and medicine—a little better. He says that if they kill Thanos, he and Shuri and Bruce will work together to undo the more harmful mods.

This is what humans do, Gamora has learned.  It’s like Peter. They always plan for victory.

Anyway, Strange says, Mantis will help heighten Thanos’s susceptibility to the reappearance of his favorite dead daughter.  And, he adds, his other dead daughter. Though less recognizable—really Nebula’s just there to be in on the fight.

Heimdall has been tracking the arc of Mjolnir through the multiverse.  Only Thor can hold it, so when the time comes, Loki will use his magic to slingshot his brother out into space and then use it to reel him back in, right through the walls, a momentary ghost himself.  They hope Mjolnir will kill Thanos, but if not, they at least hope that Gamora will distract him enough that someone can do the job. Because they aren’t short on fighters. Sam Wilson and Okoye command them all—the winged prophet and the general.  When the time comes, they will all fight, even down to the children.

And if all else fails, Banner will get angry.  Not that that will make them win, Strange says, but it will at least make their loss bloodier and faster.  Nobody likes a slow death, he says, and then he sounds more like a doctor than a magician.

Gamora listens to all of this, cares about all of this, but none of it compares to how she feels when she first opens Natasha Romanoff’s eyes.

She has not seen them before—she is no ghost, to haunt, she is not anything—but there they are.

“Peter,” she says.  He’s so young. He looks unformed, like his skin should be wet clay, and he doesn’t know her.  “Drax, Mantis.” They know her, at least. Mantis touches her hand and weeps and it takes Gamora a moment to understand that those are Mantis’s own tears shed for Mantis’s own feelings.  “Rocket. Groot.” They don’t know her either—Groot is grown, this is not how she left him—but Rocket lets Gamora put her hand on the silky fur between his ears. She breathes in the smell of Groot’s sap.

Then she sees the armor.  “Nebula.”

“Scarecrow, I missed you most of all,” Tony Stark says in a falsetto, and Gamora’s young Peter shoves an elbow into his ribs so hard that Gamora swears she almost hears a crack, though Tony barely blinks.  Instead, he says, “She can, um—she can feel you. A little. I think. I mean, I’ve never really designed for ghosts before, but I think the sensors might pick up on touch.”

Without hesitation, Gamora steps into her sister’s metal arms.  She presses her head against the broad plates of Nebula’s chest.  “Can you feel me?”

“Yes,” Nebula says.  Her voice is staticky, but it’s her own.  “I can feel you. I can feel you.”

Then Heimdall says, “It’s time.  Loki, _now_ ,” and green light flares up like a sudden storm.  Thor vanishes.

It sets off alarms.  Gamora doesn’t know enough about the plan to know whether or not that’s part of it, but she thinks it must be, because the strange ghost version of Loki that splits off from him says to Heimdall, “If this doesn’t work and he gets hold of me again, kill me,” and he sounds weary but accepting, like this is a loss he wrote off long ago.  Heimdall grips him by the neck like he’s an errant puppy and shakes him but nods. Loki’s ghost vanishes, Loki gasps, and then Thor is back.

With a sledgehammer in his hand.

“Thank you, brother,” he says.

Thanos explodes into the room.  What does he see? All his enemies, all his children crowded close together.  A living suit of armor. Thor restored to his full might. And Natasha Romanoff—he thinks—weeping against cold steel.

Thanos knows betrayal when he sees it.  He raises his hand.

Gamora steps away from Nebula.

Thanos falters.  “Your hair,” he says.

Gamora’s voice is hoarse.  “Yes,” she says. “It’s my hair, Father.”

He smiles, ecstatic, a mystic on the verge of revelation, a worshipper face-to-face with his idol.  But Gamora feels like something else—not the work of his hands, to be built up and then melted down for his purpose.  She feels like something of her own. She has so much soul now.

“Gamora,” Thanos says.  “Daughter. You came back to me.”

Mantis sidles around him and lays her bare hands against his arm.  Thanos goes slack-jawed and bright-eyed with wonder. He falls to his knees.  Gamora can hear them already starting to think that this is easier than they ever thought it would be.  But it isn’t easy for her. She could have gone all eternity without seeing him again. She doesn’t want this: his eyes on hers at the end of everything, the helpless pulse of love at his throat.  She breaks their gaze and looks over him, back again to her sister, who deserved so much and has gotten so little. Nebula’s face is a smooth metal mask now.

This will kill Nebula, too.  But Gamora promised, in so many words, that someday she would let Nebula win.  Even if costs both of them everything.

“I love you,” she says, and it doesn’t even bother her that Thanos thinks the words are for him.  She can see her sister; she can see Peter and Rocket and Groot and Drax and Mantis. “I came back for you.”

Thor brings his hammer down.

 

**INFINITY**

And then they tend to their dead, such as they are.  Nebula’s ghost goes soon after Thanos’s fall. Tony picks up the fallen helmet and dusts it off carefully with his sleeve.  He treats it like a fallen soldier; he is careful with the body. Later he will pass her to Wanda, who will listen to Peter Quill and give Nebula’s brief body a Ravager’s funeral.

Natasha is unconscious for two days.  When Steve asks her later what she remembers of Gamora’s time inside her head, all Natasha can tell him is that it wasn’t her _head_ at all.  She says, “I kind of thought I lost my soul a long time ago.  Guess not.”

Shuri, Bruce, and Strange take over the medical bay and begin the work of undoing what can be undone by tech and ingenuity alone.  The Infinity Gauntlet would restore them all to their old bodies in the blink of an eye, but by common agreement, even among the most damaged of them, they are leaving the Gauntlet alone.  The beams of the universe are already creaking. Who knows what one more blow will do to them? So Shuri and Bruce and Strange bend their will to do what they can. Wanda and Loki pitch in.

Peter’s problems are somewhat solvable.  Steve’s are less so. Loki regains his voice, but it takes hours of surgery that include working around Thor, who will not relinquish his brother’s hand.

Sam keeps the wings.  They hurt, he says, but he really did always want to fly.

And then they all have to decide what to do.  They have fought for Thanos; they have killed for him.  They have been mutilated. Their homes and times have been ripped away from them; the Asgard and Wakanda and Brooklyn and Queens they left behind are not the ones they would return to.  What they have is a moth-eaten universe, a spaceship, and each other.

“Well, me personally I’m in favor of trading in this shithole for something a little friendlier,” Rocket says.  “So scratch the spaceship part. New spaceship, that’s step one.”

“Yes,” Drax agrees.  “The lighting in this ship has always been dim.  And there are bloodstains on most of the floors.”

Sam gets a kick out of that: “I’m glad we’re factoring in the interior design.”

“I could find us a new ship,” Heimdall says calmly.

“I am Groot.”

“Why would we have to steal it?” Mantis wonders.

“Because we are wanted criminals in every star system,” Okoye says.

Loki still covers his throat with his hand when he talks, as if he has to hold it together.  “Shockingly much easier to come back from than you’d think.”

Drax nods.

Peter Quill says, “I know thieving.”

Thor smiles.  “I know a man at the far end of the galaxy with very few morals and very many ships.  It might not bother us much to steal from him in particular.”

“The universe will need repairing,” T’Challa says, with a nod to Steve.  “I don’t know how we would even start such a task, but we would seem uniquely equipped to handle it.”

“Sounds like fun,” Bucky says.

They name the new ship the _Infinity_ , but that’s only a joke to make sense of the fact that there’s no real consensus among them on what to call it: the _Gamora,_ the _Nebula,_ the _May_ , the _Frigga,_ the _Peggy,_ the _Nakia_ , the _Maria_ , the _KITT,_ the _Pietro_ , the _Ark_ , the _Fuck Thanos_.  Infinity seems simplest.  They know each other well enough now that they can call their home whatever they like and all the others will understand.  After everything, there is nothing that is constant—not gravity, not the stars, not time—but together they can make do.


End file.
